Welcome to Matt Hart territory, a strange, at times bewildering, often brilliant expanse where our trail guide ranges back and forth or hovers over the boundaries between everyday domestic details and a richly imagined wilderness; where familiar home-sweet-home comforts offer startlingly sincere glimpses into “the mirror that raised me as a wolf” and inspire the “beauty-buzzing hive-life” that fills these poems to bursting.

—Paul Violi

In my desire to say something about the book in your hand to make it the book in your pocket, the book in your chest, I came upon “care about something deeply and then demonstrate those depths” and knew this is what the book wanted to say about itself. That phrase is either the definition of poetry or the definition of Matt Hart or a recipe for love or all of the above if the above includes fistfuls of unease overcome by an almost rabid need to convey the fullness of existence. Matt Hart is purely and powerfully a singer of connection— its possibility, necessity—a poet of incessant drive and tenderness who is wise enough to limit his perspective to everything.

—Bob Hicok

A record of what it is like to be alive in this world. It is particular to one man, and his dog, his wife, his daughter, his friends, and a little house in Cincinnati in this century, and in being so faithful to the details of an individual existence, in sounding in minor keys, it is able to resonate in major ones. Where you might expect irony, there is intelligent empathy, where most of us would stop at sadness, Matt Hart persists into wonderment.He isn’t feeling or noticing anything any of us haven’t felt or noticed before. But his spirit might be extra large, more evolved, his armspan more expansive. He isn’t blind to the small and large horrors or sadnesses of our time, but he is still choosing to sing. And the whole thing is a song.

—Darcie Dennigan

Matt Hart was born in Evansville, Indiana in 1969. He earned a degree in Philosophy from Ball State University and an MFA in Poetry from The Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers. His first book Who’s Who Vivid was published by Slope Editions in 2006. A co-founder and the editor-in-chief of Forklift, Ohio: A Journal of Poetry, Cooking & Light Industrial Safety, he lives with his wife and daughter in Cincinnati, where he teaches in the Academic Studies Department at the Art Academy of Cincinnati.